Edythe's Face

And yes, I've managed to shrink all the text and other stuff on Edythe down again. Everything is so much more compact than before, and it's becoming more and more like my style. More pixel estate dudes~!



The colour scheme used is Royale, which is essentially a face lift of the standard Luna theme that comes with Windows XP. I first saw this theme on a Windows Media Center edition desktop somewhere in some computer store some time last year, and have fallen in love with the cool shades of blue that it has. Compared with the solid (and dull) Luna, this is certainly a vast improvement.

Unlike most people, I love to keep my start menu and task bar above the screen, set to two lines, and kept hidden unless I move my mouse there. Well, for one, this increases the amount of screen space that I have to see my applications (90+ pixel space is roughly 10+ lines of code). For two, the top location makes it less obtrusive, since the title bar of the windows do not usually show anything worthed reading, while the status bars of most windows are below (and thus show more useful information). So, in the case where the start menu refuses to cooperate, no loss of productivity will be expected.

Notice the little command prompt window on the lower left? That's a bash shell straight out of cygwin, an excellent POSIX compatible interface for Windows machines. I've augmented it with several enhancements, including adding a date/time mechanism, and an in-house built battery indicator (the one in the picture shows that I'm running on AC and so there's no battery meter to show). Needless to say, this prompt packs a punch, and I can and do lots of system management straight from the bash shell. This includes controlling foobar2000, which is easily the most powerful and versatile music player available on the Windows platform.

By the way, the bash shell here is only for system management. Most of my code hacking is done with a much bigger bash shell that sits comfortably on the left side of the screen (always on the left, never shifted anywhere):



And if you thought this was big, wait till you see the next screen shot:



This is the badass way in which I do hard core hacking. It's actually 6 bash shells running in 6 xterms on an X-server, configured as shown in the picture above. It's a pretty powerful combination, allowing me to do lots of stuff at the same time without ever having to run to and fro the main windows interface. It's still Windows XP, but it is really a cygwin innovation.

And no, the 6 windows do not all reside at the same time on the screen; they are partitioned into 2x2 virtual screens. That makes it even more powerful than ever.

So much for a geeky post on Edythe's face. hahahaha...